Animal Myths

Animal Myths, Checked Against the Primary Sources

We checked 15 popular animal claims against primary studies, museums, and wildlife agencies. 14 were false. Full sourcing plus a downloadable dataset.

Last updated: 2026-08-22

A common ostrich walking across grassland, head held high on its long neck rather than buried in the ground — Photo: Jerry Fischer, a common ostrich in Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa, CC BY-SA 4.0

Core summary

We checked 15 of the internet's most-repeated animal claims against primary studies, museum research pages, and government wildlife agencies rather than against other listicles. 14 of the 15 were false outright. The one exception, the praying mantis eating its mate's head, is real but far rarer in the wild (13 to 28% of matings) than the near-universal rate that cramped laboratory terrariums produced and popular science writing then repeated as fact.

Why this table exists

Most "animal myths, debunked" pages on the internet cite each other. One site's list gets copied into the next site's list, and a claim that was never checked against a primary source picks up the authority of repetition instead. This page works from the other direction: every row links to a study, a museum's own research page, or a government wildlife agency, not to another myth-busting listicle.

Four of the fifteen are FactCrumbs' own reporting: Camel Spiders, Wolf Spider, Axolotl and Velociraptor each got a full article built around primary sources before landing here as one line. The rest are claims we checked specifically for this table, sourced the same way. It will grow as new FactCrumbs articles add their own verdicts.

The verdicts

Claim	Verdict	Evidence	Source
Camel spiders can run 10 mph and are dangerously venomous	False	No venom glands exist in the order Solifugae; the 10 mph figure traces back to an unsourced estimate nobody has actually measured.	FactCrumbs: Camel Spiders
Wolf spider bites cause necrotic, flesh-eating wounds	False	A prospective clinical study of 45 confirmed wolf spider bites found pain and redness in every case and necrosis in none.	FactCrumbs: Wolf Spider
The axolotl sold as a pet is the same, genetically, as the wild Xochimilco population	False	The lab stock behind nearly every pet and research axolotl carries 5.8% tiger salamander DNA on average, traced to one Minnesota specimen collected in 1962.	FactCrumbs: Axolotl
Velociraptor was a scaly, roughly human-sized predator (the Jurassic Park version)	False	A real adult Velociraptor weighed 14 to 20 kg, stood about knee-high, and left fossil quill knobs proving it carried real feathers.	FactCrumbs: Velociraptor
Goldfish have a memory span of about three seconds	False	Goldfish have been trained to run mazes and tell apart musical pieces, remembering the task for months afterward.	Discover Magazine
Lemmings periodically march off cliffs in mass suicide	False	The famous 1958 Disney footage was staged: lemmings were shipped to a landlocked set and driven off a rotating turntable by the film crew.	Snopes
Bulls charge because they're enraged by the color red	False	Cattle lack red-detecting cone cells entirely; controlled tests (including on Mythbusters) show bulls charge at movement regardless of a cape's color.	Live Science
Ostriches bury their heads in sand when frightened	False	Threatened ostriches flatten against the ground to hide, or dip into a ground nest to turn eggs, and neither looks like burying a head up close.	McGill Office for Science and Society
"Daddy long-legs" are the most venomous spiders alive but can't bite through human skin	False	The usual referent, harvestmen, aren't spiders at all and have no venom glands or fangs whatsoever.	Burke Museum, University of Washington
Bats are blind	False	All roughly 1,400 known bat species have functioning eyes, and several see well into the UV range.	Encyclopaedia Britannica
Sharks don't get cancer	False	Tumors have been documented in more than 20 shark species since 1908, including a photographed great white with a visible tumor in 2013.	Scientific American
Elephants are afraid of mice	False	Controlled tests (Mythbusters, ABC's 20/20) found elephants react with curiosity or a brief startle, not fear, when a mouse appears.	Live Science
Female praying mantises always eat the male's head during mating	Partially true	It happens, but in only 13 to 28% of matings observed in the wild, well below the near-universal rate that cramped, no-escape lab terrariums produced.	Snopes / Entomology Today
Touching a toad or frog gives you warts	False	Warts are caused by human-specific strains of HPV entering through broken skin, not by contact with amphibian skin.	Cleveland Clinic
Camels store water in their humps	False	A camel's hump stores fat, up to about 36 kg (80 lb) of it; camels instead survive on efficient water retention and can down 20 gallons in one sitting.	Library of Congress, Everyday Mysteries

Cite this

FactCrumbs Editorial, “Animal Myths, Checked Against the Primary Sources,” FactCrumbs, published August 4, 2026, https://factcrumbs.com/animal-myths-index/.

Download the full table (CSV, 15 claims, one row each)

How a claim gets into this table

A row needs a primary source: a peer-reviewed study, a museum or university research page, or a named government agency. General-audience science journalism counts only when it reports directly on a named study or institution rather than repeating an unsourced number, which is the same problem this table exists to avoid.

Where the evidence itself is mixed, the verdict says so instead of forcing a clean "true" or "false". The praying mantis row is the one case so far: the behavior is real, the near-universal rate popular writing attaches to it is not, and the table records the actual range instead of picking a side.

Frequently asked questions

How many animal myths has FactCrumbs fact-checked?

Fifteen as of this table's last update, four of them backed by a full FactCrumbs article (camel spiders, wolf spiders, axolotls and Velociraptor) and eleven checked directly against a primary source, museum page, or government wildlife agency for this table. The count grows as new articles publish.

Can I cite this page or reuse the data?

Yes. A suggested citation sits next to the download link in the table above, and the full 15-row dataset is downloadable as CSV further up this page, with a source URL on every row so you can verify each verdict independently.

Why does the praying mantis row say "partially true" instead of picking true or false?

Because the underlying research is genuinely mixed, not because we're hedging. Female praying mantises do sometimes eat their mates, but wild observation puts the rate at 13 to 28% of matings, while the near-100% figure popular science writing often repeats comes from lab studies that trapped both mantises in a small terrarium with no escape route.

Is a myth marked False here settled science, permanently?

As settled as the cited source makes it. Wart causation by HPV and cattle color-blindness are about as settled as biology gets; a few of the animal-behavior rows (like the mantis one) rest on a smaller number of field observations and could shift if more data comes in. Each row's source link is there so you can check the current state yourself rather than take the table's word for it.

Sources